Weng Fen

Weng Fen (also known as Weng Peijun) is an artist who works in mixed media. Serving as a Teacher at the Art Collage of Hainan University, Weng lives and works in Hainan.

Weng was born in 1961 in Hainan, China and graduated from Guangzhou Academy of Fine Arts in 1985.

Many of Weng Fen’s projects—’Bird’s Eye View’, ‘On the Wall’, ‘Staring at the Lake’—feature figures, usually school children, with their backs to the camera staring out over the landscape. In Weng’s most recent series, ‘Staring at the Lake’, all the images are taken in England’s Lake District and represent a new beginning in his search for utopia. Weng once again evolves from his subject matter, tackling the issues of travel, migration and globalization affecting China and its people with the same sensibility and precision shown in his previous works.

The recent urban modernizations of cities all over China seem to be driving societies in China in the direction of a homogeneous urban culture, while at the same time eliminating origins and histories. Those critical differences between north and south are gradually erased by the tides of duplicated cultural spaces characterized by homogeneous skyscrapers. Together with the lamentation of the loss of identity, Weng Fen’s photographs allegorically represent the internal motivation behind the civic social ideology of modernization and evolution of Chinese society, its identities and aspirations in the globalized world of a new Chinese century.